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Sardar Akhtar

Biography from TheMovieDB

Sardar Akhtar (1915–1986) was a prominent actress in pre-independence Hindi cinema, known for her powerful screen presence and emotionally grounded performances. Beginning her career in stunt and social films during the silent and early talkie era, she transitioned into more serious roles by the late 1930s. Her breakthrough came with Pukar (1939), directed by Sohrab Modi, where she played Queen Noor Jehan with striking dignity and restraint.  She earned acclaim for her role in Mehboob Khan’s Aurat (1940), a performance considered a precursor to Nargis’s iconic turn in Mother India (1957). In Aurat, Sardar Akhtar portrayed a rural mother battling poverty and injustice—a role that cemented her as one of the era’s most respected actresses. Off screen, she married Mehboob Khan and eventually stepped away from acting, but her legacy endured as part of a generation that helped define socially conscious Hindi cinema.  Though her filmography isn’t vast, Sardar Akhtar’s work left a deep impact, especially in films that explored themes of gender, sacrifice, and rural life with nuance and emotional depth.

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Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).

Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).

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Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)

While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:

  • I added "runners up" to Top 10 lists, treating them as ties where applicable and numbering them accordingly at the bottom of each list.
  • Regarding those polls wherein "franchise" movies were submitted as one project until BFI's policy changed to regard them separately, I treated them as ties and renumbered the affected lists accordingly (e.g. the Godfather films).

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Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).

Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.

Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.